Hang Up and Drive

I’ve seen a couple of surveys in which something like 85% of the respondents said they felt they were above-average drivers.  Now, even allowing for the fact that it wouldn’t take much to be a better than average driver today, that doesn’t add up.  In our rush to debase all our values, one that has suffered is the ability, or even the willingness, to pay attention to what one is doing, and when a person is handling two or three tons of deadly metal hurtling down the road, that’s a serious problem.

Writing in his “Side Glances” column in Road & Track (March 2010), Peter Egan says of an excursion with his wife, “I . . . started braking for a turn onto Union Road.  As I did so, a young woman in a small lozenge-shaped GM economy car (your guess is as good as mine) glided through the stop sign on Union Road at about 25 mph without looking our way.  She was on her cellphone, slouched against the door and gazing off in the other direction.

“The timing was perfect.  If I hadn’t already backed off the throttle and started braking, she would have killed us.

“I honked my horn, but the horn on my Triumph is pathetic.  It makes the same bleating sound a small sheep would make if you poked it in the butt with a sharp stick.  I hasten to say that I have never actually done this to a small sheep, but I think you can imagine the sound.

“In any case, the horn did not penetrate either the car window or the woman’s consciousness and she continued onward, without ever having seen us.”

It has been established that driving while talking on a phone, even a hands-free one, is even more dangerous than driving while intoxicated.  States have been slow to enact laws against the practice, presumably because big business deals are made in people’s vehicles, and even where there are such laws I have never heard of one being enforced, at least without an accident’s resulting from the infraction.

Well, then, of course this is the information age, and one must keep communicating, right?  Well, no; this information age coincides with some very serious problems with articulateness.  Have you listened to the typical cellphone conversation?  It’s hardly possible not to.  In most cases it’s dominated by the word “like” and includes nothing that wouldn’t have been better left unsaid.

So what is going on here?  I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s some sort of mirroring:  If someone is listening to me I must exist and be worth listening to.  (Maybe writing one of these columns is a related phenomenon.)  You know, R. D. Laing and some other psychologists concluded a few decades back that when a baby cries because its mother has left the area it’s not on account of any feeling of being in danger, but that the baby is afraid if it isn’t being observed it may not exist.

Maybe that’s it.  Young people especially, as the victims of that form of education that attempts to install self-esteem by simply telling children they are “special” and never telling them they are wrong, rather than motivating them to do something worthwhile, just might have a pretty tenuous hold on any sense of their own reality.  But must they take it out on the streets and roads?  And must our law enforcement people refuse to ticket them and fine them for endangering the lives of our children?  It’s pretty dang hypocritical to pretend to be out there to protect people from themselves and each other while ignoring what must be the most dangerous widespread practice of all among drivers.